Directed by David Buchert- Written by David Meier Smith
- Starring
- Natalie Hart
- Roger Horn
- Jamie Reynolds
- Katie Vaughn
- Patrick Holt
I suppose if Hollywood studios are going to continue to remake the drive-in slasher flicks of a generation back (can a reimagining of Slumber Party Massacre 4 be far away), I can’t blame too heartily the indie filmmakers who mine that same vein to produce their homages. The genre imposes its own strictures on creativity and originality; a film too innovative rises above the lowered expectations associated with the label. Blood Oath shows that tension between trying to add new twists and remaining true to a genre that made unoriginality one of its core virtues. Add to that the swings in filmmaking quality resulting from a dedicated and talented crew without a lot of real experience, and the results are decidedly mixed.
The first scene (i.e., the throwaway meat) illustrates plenty of these tensions. Young couple Marc (Enrique Camacho) and Janet (Tiffany Shepis, qualifying as a celebrity cameo) drive into the middle of Tennesseean nowhere for some privacy and some “quality time.” Yes, you may roll your eyes at the hoary cliche that guarantees their dismaying deaths in the near future. However, the meantime, the scene is well-acted; Tiffany Shepis is by all account a surprisingly good actress, though the parts in which she’s cast usually have her showing more cleavage than characterization. After Janet bellows on the cellphone at Marc’s ex-girlfriend Beverly and Marc tries to salvage that ended relationship (at least so she won’t burn the CDs he left at her place), they’re suddenly attacked by a savage, rag-dressed something. Marc is beheaded in a use of CGI that probably looked better on paper; Janet, who suddenly doesn’t remember how to operate her own vehicle, is disemboweled. Then the killer thing goes through her pockets and latches onto her lipstick. Under the patchwork rags and fright wig, the killer is sorta kinda female.
And thus starts the saga of the Fred Flintstone Killer…
We then proceed to our main story (and again, cliche alert): Two college couples spending the weekend at a cabin in the woods. In fact one couple, Beverly and Charlie (Katie Vaughan and Roger Horn), are Mark and Janet’s respective exes. Kevin (James Reynolds) owns the cabin, and his date is Lisa (Natalie Hart). It doesn’t take long to realize that our best two thespians were killed before the opening credits; acting for the rest of the movie will range from mildly adequate (Vaughan and Horn) to natural but overly phlegmatic (Reynolds) to “I think I’m starring in a Disney Channel original!” (Hart). Kevin contributes the necessary exposition by sharing the scary story that his aunt taught him about the Krupps, a couple living in a cabin in the woods in the ‘50s who made a token blood sacrifice to the earth goddess for the health of their soon-to-be-born twin girls at the behest of some crazy woman of the woods. When the babies were born, the crazy woman demanded that one be sacrificed to ensure the blessings on the other; the Krupps refused and tried to drive into town, only to have a horrific accident; both parents were killed and one of the twins was thrown clear and survived, but the other was horribly disfigured and disappeared into the woods. They say she wanders these woods still…
From this story (and the accompanying flashback footage), we learn several things. (1) The script really needed another pass. Kevin’s narration sounds like neither natural dialog nor somebody trying to tell a spooky story. (2) Our four college students think they’re smart – they start talking about how scary stories were passed around to reinforce morality and such – but they’re really not that bright; nobody realized that if no one but newborns survived the crash and one disappeared, there would be no one around to recount the salient details of the event. (3) Earth goddesses. You just can’t win with them.
“Gee, the beavers out here in the deep wood sure do chew off their logs straight, don’t they?”
Since Kevin’s aunt also told him the secret of the putative whereabouts of the old cabin where the disfigured twin is supposed to still live, and since the four of them really have nothing better to do with their weekend (except, you know, dot dot dot), they decide to make the twenty-mile hike through the woods the next day to see if they can find the cabin. They do pack a few supplies, but this could easily have been a movie about four city kids who decided to tramp through twenty miles of unmarked forests without blazing a trail only to get lost and eventually turn to cannibalism. (Not as unprepared for their wilderness trek as some horror movie fodder, but still definitely not role models for the Boy Scout of America.)
Somewhere in here, I need to mention Tina Krause’s cameo as someone else wandering in the woods, taking pictures with her Polaroid (because soooo many people shoot nature photography with Polaroids these days). She meets Charlie briefly while he’s taking a leak, then wanders further and meets her doom at the end of the disfigured twin’s pruning hook. (Later, her three camping companions also get met and chopped up.) Now that I have mentioned her cameo, my due diligence is done.
“It’s okay, I have a press pass.”
I quickly started losing whatever empathy I may have had for our four protagonists once I realized that their every decision was motivated entirely by the need to keep on being in a horror movie. Like the point at which they realize that, as far as they’ve come in the woods, they wouldn’t even make it back to their own cabin before nightfall… so they’ll just continue trekking though the woods at dusk! And if they find the legendary cabin, well, they’ll just stay there for the night, because even if the cabin exists, the deformed killer woman in the woods surely can’t, right?
The “cabin,” when they find it, is larger than my three-bedroom tract home. They assume that it’s long-abandoned, which again shows that these city folk should never have been allowed anywhere without sidewalks; abandoned houses have warped floorboards and peeling wallpaper and crumbling ceiling plaster, not a general air of tidy spareness. But being not entirely brain dead, they do show trepidation when they find cell phones abandoned around the house (resulting, possibly, from the frat initiation pledges who periodically come looking for the cabin). They also find a drawer full of jewelry, including class rings. That’s where Charlie starts to get the creeps: “One of those rings was dated just last year. This isn’t all ancient history.” Kids these days, they don’t remember that it’s only been in the last decade that everybody carried a cell phone everywhere. [old fogey mode]Why, back when I was in college…[/old fogey mode]
At last, they’ve set a horror movie in my old student apartment!
Eventually, of course, they start getting slaughtered in earnest. Even then, their actions are governed by scriptwriter convenience. (Pop quiz: Once you and a friend have gotten out of the house where the other two have been killed, is it smarter to run like hell through the woods, or to go back into the house after the lantern and a knife? Yeah, I thought so.) And there’s a payoff, of sorts, to the legend of the twins. After all, as Anton Chekov famously said, if you’re going to mention a non-disfigured twin who was adopted out in the first act, you’ve got to have a “surprising” twist on that information in the third act.
There are a few shining moments that affirm to me that, whatever the movie’s systemic flaws, its makers were really trying to make something good. The foursome of protagonists at least have more personality than the default bickerfest that characterizes too many slasher casts; they also show some familiarity of horror movie pop culture (with at least one of-hand Blair Witch Project reference) without sliding into winking self-awareness. The camera work shows instances of graceful handling, though such instances are isolated from one another. And it turns out that the final plot twist was foreshadowed in the opening scenes in a manner that, in retrospect, I must say was clever.
[insert imported Chinese toy joke here]
Alas, the good intentions so evidenced don’t make up for a plot which forces the characters into imbecilic actions simply to reach the foreordained conclusion. This neo-retro-slasher movie inherits the fate of most of its progenitors by being simply forgettable.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 10
- breasts: 4
- explosions: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
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